INSTRUCTORS

The instructors of Open Leadership Network courses are undisputed experts in their domain subject areas. Here are some Quick Links to help you see the scope of expertise and depth of experience of each of our teachers :

Meet The Instructors of the Open Leadership Network





VICTOR LOKE

Victor teaches THE EIGHT PATTERNS OF OPEN BUSINESS AGILITY.

Victor is an Enterprise Coach and a seasoned practitioner of the Open patterns and practices. An expert on Scrum, he is passionate in helping people and organisations achieve success through lasting, positive change. He is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and an accredited coach trainer with the International Coaching Federation (ICF), where he delivers world-class coach training to leaders of the future.

Victor helps lead the AGILE SINGAPORE user group and is the founder and organiser of the REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERING SINGAPORE conference. He further serves on the Executive Committee of the Malaysian Association of Corporate Coaches as Director of Learning & Development.

Victor publishes and speaks regularly at Agile conferences worldwide. He was conferred the prestigious SkillsFuture Fellowship Award, the highest accolade for skills mastery presented by the President of Singapore, in 2021.





MARKUS BRANDL

Markus teaches THE EIGHT PATTERNS OF OPEN BUSINESS AGILITY.

Based in Munich Germany, Markus is an expert in business agility and innovation with more than 15 years of “hands-on” experience in the agile environment. As a generalist in the areas of agility, innovation and technology, Markus supports companies from the automotive, energy, e-commerce as well as telecommunication sectors in a holistic alignment regarding their value creation. Lively, sustainable and pragmatic change approaches are at the forefront of his work. As Managing Partner of the Flight Levels Academy, Flight Levels Guide (FLG), Cert. OKR Master (COM), Cert. SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), Cert. Lean Portfolio Manger (LPM) as well as Open Leadership Network Instructor, Markus offers companies his broad knowledge and experience combined with the necessary option space to support them on their own way towards “Business Agility”.

Markus has the distinction of being the first OLN instructor to be licensed and authorized to teach the Eight Open Patterns of Business Agility course.

   

DOUG KIRKPATRICK

Doug Kirkpatrick speaks and consults on self-management throughout North America and around the world. He also shares the message of organizational innovation through his best-selling books Beyond Empowerment and From Hierarchy to High Performance, via his TEDx talk, and numerous articles and posts. His newest book from Forbes Books, The No-Limits Enterprise, launches July 23rd, 2019. Gartner Research Director Mark McGregor wrote that “Doug is a leading expert in the field of organizational design.”

Doug Kirkpatrick served as the first financial controller for Morning Star, now the world’s largest tomato processing company. The founder introduced the startup team to the core principles of self-management, which they immediately adopted. At Morning Star, Doug learned that organizational self-management is real, it works and it drives superior business performance.

In 2008, Doug Kirkpatrick co-founded the Morning Star Self-Management Institute, with the mission of instantiating organizational self-management principles with effective education, tools, and practices.

CAITLIN WALKER

Caitlin is a pioneer in the domain of Clean Learning and the developer of Systemic Modelling™. She is the author of From Contempt to Curiosity, which details many of the innovative and transformational projects that she has led across the U.K. and beyond.

She has developed modeling methods from small scale group development to at-scale organizational culture-change programmes. She designs and delivers tailor made learning and development programs for addressing diversity, conflict, leadership, managing mergers, and creating learning organizations. Caitlin resides in the U.K. and teaches the Clean Language methodology worldwide.

 

   

HEIDI ARAYA

With over 20 years of experience in a wide range of industries and roles, Heidi brings a pragmatic approach to her work leading transformation in organizations through the use of Open methods. Heidi is currently Director of Agile Transformation at Tenable, a cybersecurity firm based in Maryland.

A passionate and vocal champion of the Open movement, Heidi trains and speaks at events and conferences worldwide. She also co-hosts a very popular virtual-video meetup series for Agilists you can learn more about and sign up for, at www.coachingagilejourneys.com. Her forthcoming book is The Agile Open Practitioner: Growing High Performing Teams.

   

MIKE BURROWS

Mike Burrows is an expert in implementing outcome-oriented business strategy and agile/digital transformation. He is the pioneering formulator of Agendashift , an engagement model based on Open principles. He has authored three books for decision-makers with budget authority for agile and digital transformation, Kanban from the Inside , Agendashift and Right to Left.

Mike Burrows has been honored with awards like Brickell Key award for his community contribution and service to the business and project management community. He and his team at Agendashift help organizations in keeping their strategy and vision aligned with the culture of continuous transformation and co-creation.

   

MARIAN WAY

Marian is an expert in delivering complex ideas to diverse audiences. She has taken the genius work of David Grove around Clean Language and developed a series of learning modules that bring Clean Language to a worldwide audience.

Marian is a director of both Clean Learning and Training Attention UK, world leaders in Clean applications for corporate, educational and community development. She has authored or co-authored three books on the use of Clean Language for personal and corporate transformational change.

   

STACIA VISCARDI HEIMGARTNER

Teaching and coaching Scrum for over 12 years, Stacia is a Business Agility Coach, a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) & Coach, a noted authority on Scrum, and an author of The Professional ScrumMaster’s Handbook.  Stacia was one of the very first Certified Scrum Trainers in the USA, taught by Ken Schwaber himself.

Stacia is an expert on enabling high-performance business agility through the application of Open principles.  Her forthcoming book FailAgility provides a set of guidelines and specific step-by-step advise on what to do, and what not to do, when the goal is enterprise-wide improvement.

 

 

MARK SHEFFIELD

Mark an Agile coach, certified trainer, and author of two books organizational change. He focuses on explaining and then implementing invitation, opt-in, and pull when coaching Agile to executives, teams and organizations. Mark has been training, coaching, and launching Agile teams since 2013 and has over 20 years’ experience developing software solutions.

In 2015 he co-authored The OpenSpace Agility Handbook, which describes an engagement model for leveraging invitation and Agile principles when implementing organizational change. See www.OpenSpaceAgility.com for more information.

In 2018 he co-authored Inviting Leadership, a tutorial and reference guide for making the shift from leadership delegation, to leadership invitation. See www.InvitingLeadership.com for more information.

   

DIANA WILLIAMS

Diana Williams is an agile and executive coach. She has over 8 years of experience delivering enterprise level Agile coaching to executive leaders, management and teams. She is a passionate learner and teacher, holding eight different certifications including the OpenSpace Agility Certified Trainer credential.

Her teams recognize significant productivity gains, improved quality, and better predictability. She is empathic with her teams and stakeholders, helping them achieve things they did not realize were possible.

DARREN TERRELL

Darren is the Vice President of Enterprise Agile Coaching at Project Brilliant. As a senior transformation specialist, he has worked with executives and Agile teams for many years and has a breadth of experience in creating the conditions for agile and digital transformation in the private and public sectors.  Darren is a pioneer in the practical application of Open patterns and practices to facilitate real agility in large organizations. He serves as a board member for the Agile Cincinnati and is also a co-organizer for Agile Ft. Wayne.

ASTRID CLAESSEN

After 25 years in IT and 10 years of Agile Coaching my current belief is that the most important thing to scale is engagement. There is no such thing as a successful change program without high levels of human engagement. Business Agility is about clarity of what you want to achieve and re-distributing authority throughout the organisation so the flow of decision making enables the flow of value. I believe Open Space Agility will help you achieve this.

DANIEL MEZICK

Coaching executives and teams since 2006, DANIEL MEZICK is a ScrumAtScale Trainer, an expert on business agility, and an author of three books on organizational change. A frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences, Daniel’s list of clients include Capital One, INTUIT, Adobe, CIGNA, Pitney Bowes, SIEMENS Healthcare, Harvard, and dozens of smaller enterprises.

His books include  THE CULTURE GAME , which describes 16 specific patterns that extend Agile ideas across the organization, beyond software; the OPEN SPACE AGILITY HANDBOOK , which pioneered the Open Engagement Models concept for agile and digital transformations; and  INVITING LEADERSHIP: Invitation-Based Change in the New World or Work™, which introduced the concept of Invitation-Based Change and introduced the domain of Authority Studies. INVITING LEADERSHIP published in 2018 and upon publication it reached #1 on the Amazon bestseller list in the Organizational Learning category.

Daniel’s enterprise consulting practice is built upon the core concepts found inside these books. He conducts workshops based on these books, and also offers enterprise Agile coaching, Agile training programs for teams, and management consulting. You can learn more and contact him at www.DanielMezick.com.

MIRIAM SASSE

After studying industrial engineering and psychology, Dr. Miriam Sasse focused on the self-optimization of project teams and work processes. She currently works as an agile coach and transformation consultant at Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA / arvato Systems. She is a certified business coach and alternative practitioner for psychotherapy, especially Schematherapy according to J. Young. Her focus is on making psychological perspectives and techniques understandable and applicable for engineers and computer scientists. Areas of application are resilience, crisis and change management – in classical projects, agile teams and transformations. An author, Miriam is the co-author of both the German-language OPEN SPACE AGILITY HANDBUCH and the German-language OPENSPACE AGILITY KOMPAKT.

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Miriam promotes and teaches the OpenSpace Agility engagement model (OSA), with which leaders create space and guardrails for employees to engage and arrive at their own solutions. This is precisely how profound and sustainable change occurs. Open Space Agility offers a structured approach to change that paves the way to a truly agile organization through freedom and transparency.

PETER FISCHBACH

Peter is an executive coach and Scrum trainer located in Berlin, Germany. He has co-delivered Scrum education with Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland over 30 times across Germany and the European Union. Within the Scrum Events network, Peter is a co-chair of SCRUM DAY, Germany’s oldest and largest Scrum conference. Scrum Events established eduScrum Germany in 2016, where Peter is an active team member.

Peter worked more than ten years as stage actor and acting coach. He has trained hundreds of actors how to discover their most vibrant personality onstage. As an executive coach specializing in Scrum, he now helps other coaches to develop their presence and have more impact.